With Syria鈥檚 announcement it will join the Paris Agreement on climate change, the US now stands alone.
Until yesterday, it was one of the final two nations either rejecting or refusing to sign the UN agreement. In September, a third holdout 鈥� Nicaragua 鈥� announced it was in after two years of stubborn refusal. But it had always argued the deal failed to go far enough to protect societies.
Syria is an international pariah, a dysfunctional basket-case of a failed state. Its economy is broken and its emissions small. Yet its intention to join the Paris Agreement, announced yesterday at the annual United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany, is symbolic, but not for obvious reasons.
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Three decades of data show that nearly a quarter of conflicts that break out in countries with existing ethnic tensions, like Syria, such as heatwaves and droughts. So climate change can significantly reduce resilience in politically fragile societies, even if the direct link with conflict is complex and ambiguous.
To add to that debate, on 13 November Future Earth and the Earth League, two international alliances of scientists, will publish a report amid the climate negotiations in Bonn. It will list 10 key findings from climate research, including the increasing fragility of societies as temperatures soar. It will also put forward options to avoid this fate.
Policy rollback
What of the US? Its intention to leave the Paris Agreement is far from symbolic. The world鈥檚 largest economy and second largest emitter of greenhouse gases is aggressively rolling back policies aimed at reining in emissions, even as its scientists produce the strongest case yet for immediate and large-scale action, and clean energy becomes economically competitive.
Earth is on a knife edge. Buried at the very end of the recent headline-grabbing is the ominous final chapter 鈥溾��.
The authors say that human activity has 鈥渟ignificant potential鈥� to result in unanticipated climate shocks and a 鈥渂road consensus that the further and faster the Earth system is pushed鈥� the greater the risk鈥�.
The very last paragraph of the report states: 鈥渃limate models are omitting at least one, and probably more, processes crucial to future warming, especially in polar regions. For this reason, future changes outside the range projected by climate models cannot be ruled out, and climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change.鈥�
There is no room for complacency. As things stand, we risk hitting 2掳C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures in about two decades. We are sailing scarily close to Earth鈥檚 tipping points.
As the storm clouds continue to gather, if there is a silver lining to Trump鈥檚 actions, it is that he seems to be strengthening resolve in the rest of the world rather than weakening it.
